Hoax Alert: How to Make Mountain Dew Glow in the Dark

This looks like the coolest trick since making a geyser by dumping mentos into diet coke, but it’s fake. The video claims: Just add a bit of baking soda and several spoonfuls of hydrogen peroxide to some Mountain Dew and it will glow in the dark. Apparently, the prankster used some slight of hand to slip a bit of glow stick fluid into the soda bottle before adding the hydrogen peroxide to activate it.

The good folks at Snopes have debunked this myth and even made their own video to prove beyond a doubt that it is a hoax.

As soon as the video made its way to YouTube, people started posting comments that it’s fake. If only it was this easy to spot and disprove bogus claims in peer-reviewed scientific literature. This is why I think that publishers have an ethical obligation to tie every research paper to a message board thread. Some of the open-access journals, like chemistry central, already do this.

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